Appellate Judges Certificate Program (Santa Fe, New Mexico)

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SMU Dedman School of Law will host an Appellate Judges Certificate Program in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from June 25 – June 29, 2012.

The Certificate Program, taught by outstanding SMU Dedman School of Law faculty members, will provide the opportunity for appellate judges from around the country to engage in stimulating discourse on topics specific to appellate courts.

Appellate Judges Certificate Program Faculty

William V. Dorsaneo, III
Chief Justice John and Lena Hickman
Distinguished Faculty Fellow and Professor of Law
B.A., 1967, Phi Beta Kappa, University of Pennsylvania
J.D., 1970, Order of the Coif, University of Texas
Course: Personal Jurisdiction Over Non-Residents

Gregory S. Crespi
Professor of Law
B.S., 1969, Michigan State University
M.S., 1974, George Washington University
Ph.D., 1978, University of Iowa
J.D., 1985, Yale Law School

Joshua C. Tate
Associate Professor of Law
B.A. summa cum laude, 1996, Pomona College
M.Phil., 1997, University of Cambridge
M.A., 2000, Yale University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
M.Phil., 2001, Yale University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
J.D., 2002, Yale Law School
Ph.D., 2009, Yale University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Program Information

Registration Fee:

$1,000 – ABA Member

$1,100 – Non-ABA Member

(Limited Enrollment)

Registration: Click here to download the registration form for the conference.

Scholarships: A limited number of scholarships, provided by the Appellate Judges Education Institute (AJEI), are available for active appellate judges whose courts cannot fully pay their expenses.

Conference Material: Conference reading material will be sent to registrants prior to the conference. Download the brochure here.

Transportation For Air Travelers: Flying into Albuquerque and renting a car is the most popular way of traveling to Santa Fe, an easy one hour drive north of the Albuquerque airport. Shuttle service is available from the Albuquerque airport to downtown Santa Fe.

CLE Accreditation: 22.5 hours of CLE credit has been requested.

Attire: Dress code is business casual. The average temperature in Santa Fe in June ranges from a high of 83°F to a
low of 49°F.

Course Descriptions

Access to Justice: The Impact of Evolving Pretrial Dismissal PrinciplesProfessor William V. Dorsaneo, III
This course is designed to examine current controversies concerning court access. Recent developments in the law of personal jurisdiction limiting extraterritorial jurisdiction over nonresidents will be addressed, including recent Supreme Court decisions concerning limits on the exercise of specific and general jurisdiction and other developments.

Court access issues presented by the reinterpretation and revision of pretrial rules and statutes will also be examined to evaluate whether the adoption of or a return to heightened pleading standards and more vigorous procedural devices challenging the sufficiency of pleadings and related changes in other pretrial mechanisms which should or should not be adopted to limit court access in ways not embraced by the 1937 Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, as originally designed and promulgated, or by state procedural rules and statutes modeled on or influenced by the 1937 Federal Rules. In this connection, procedural alternatives to heightened pleading standards and vigorous dismissal devices that may more directly address current problems in the administration of justice will be discussed and evaluated.

The course will also examine how appellate standards of review should be applied by state and federal appellate courts in reviewing pretrial dismissals and the relationship of those standards to the review of factual findings in appeals following conventional trials on the merits. In this connection, if time permits, problems concerning court access and the administration of justice in appellate practice and procedure will also be discussed and evaluated.

Selected Topics in the Economic Analysis of LawProfessor Gregory S. Crespi
This short course will cover a selection of topics in the economic analysis of law that may be of special interest to appellate judges. The course will first cover—in some detail but in a relatively non-technical manner suitable for persons with limited economic backgrounds—the “economic efficiency” criterion, also sometimes called the “Kaldor-Hicks efficiency criterion” or the “wealth maximization criterion” which is commonly used by economists to evaluate the operation of laws and other governmental policies and to make recommendations for law reforms.

The course will then turn to consideration of the important threshold question of whether a judge who embraces the goal of promoting economic efficiency is justified in issuing rulings that are primarily intended to encourage efficient conduct, to the extent that the constraints imposed by controlling higher court precedents or by applicable constitutional or legislative provisions, permit them to do so, or whether judges should instead, when exercising their permitted discretion, limit themselves to the more traditional judicial role of attempting to apply conventional legal doctrines primarily to achieve just results for the specific parties involved in the litigation before them.

Finally, assuming for the sake of analysis that judges are, in fact, justified in exercising their permitted discretion with the primary goal of promoting economic efficiency rather than focusing primarily upon achieving retrospective justice between the specific parties to the litigation before them, the course will then examine the classic 1970s nuisance cases of Boomer v. Atlantic Cement Co., and Spur v. Del E. Webb Development Co. as a framework for considering some of the issues that arise in promoting efficiency in cases that raise property rights disputes and for considering how the insights of the Coase Theorem regarding private bargaining bear upon these questions. Finally, time permitting, the course will also briefly examine how judges might best promote efficiency with regard to litigation concerning how particular contractual “gaps” should be filled.

History of Anglo-American Legal InstitutionsAssociate Professor Joshua C. Tate
This course will examine the development of Anglo-American legal institutions from the birth of the common law in the Middle Ages to the present day. The course will focus on two prominent themes: First, why did the common law turn to jury trial as the primary mechanism for resolving civil and criminal disputes, and how did the jury system evolve over the centuries? Second, why did the English legal system develop separate concepts of law and equity, and how did those concepts influence the subsequent development of Anglo-American law?

With regard to jury trial, the course will examine how an institution created to resolve
disputes in close-knit communities by taking advantage of local knowledge gradually came to serve very different purposes in an urbanized society and has now been marginalized to some extent by the emergence of alternatives such as bench trials, plea bargaining, and mediation. The first English jurors came to court already prepared to answer factual questions relating to a case. By the early modern period, however, jurors were no longer expected to have prior knowledge of the facts, which were instead brought to their attention by the parties and their counsel and eventually filtered through increasingly complex rules of evidence. However, jury trial has survived to the present and continues to play an important background role even in cases when the parties opt for an alternative solution.

The division between law and equity came into being as a result of the development of a separate court of Chancery, which had the power to offer remedies not available in the common law courts. Although this division was transplanted to America, various reforms resulted in the abolition of separate courts of Chancery and the consolidation of legal and equitable powers in a unified system. However, the procedural rules of equity had a powerful influence during the creation of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in the 20th century. As in the case of jury trial, an institution designed for one social context found a new purpose in a very different world.